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Press Mentions

Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble GloballyThe few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"

NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.”
He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”

BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices“There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”

AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safThe threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."

March 2010

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December 22, 2006

Holiday Fun: Tag, We're It

Nothing like a blogger "get to know you" game to get you in the spirit of the holidays. Ace web marketer David Scott tagged me, asking for five things people don't know about me and five bloggers I want to tag. Thank you, David.

Here goes:

1. I may have the only basketball autographed by baseball icon Sandy Koufax, a hoops star at the University of Cinncinati before becoming the greatest southpaw in the history of baseball.

2. My journalism career began in 1974 at Ken Kesey’s Bend in the River Conference at Chemeketa Community College in Bend, Oregon, as plans were laid to start a new alternative weekly for Eugene, Oregon. That weekly became the Willamette Valley Observer, which I served as publisher and editor for seven years.

3. I learned everything I know from that “internship” at the Observer, including how to clean worm casings out of coinboxes, “bait boxes” that we re-purposed into newspaper-selling machines.

4. Everything is Not Illuminated, according to my own Ukranian roots tour, which I made with brother to our ancestral towns of Kremenets, Tarnopol and Novy Oleksinets five years. We are trying to export a bit of light though in the Kremenets cemetery restoration product now underway.

5. I was made a Brahmin for about 32 minutes in January, 2005, when our daughter married (yes, our own Monsoon Wedding) a Kashmiri in Delhi. To become a Brahmin, I was “threaded” and then, curiously, unthreaded, soon as the five-hour-in-total ceremony ended.